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Facebook users left voiceless after poll

Jessica Guynn

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook has made it official: its users will no longer get a vote in how the social network handles their personal information.

The Facebook polls closed on Monday and despite the biggest turnout yet for such a vote, too few users cast ballots to have a say in the company's proposed policy changes.

Nearly nine in 10 of those who voted were against the proposed changes, but only about 669,000 people cast ballots. That's less than 1 per cent of Facebook's 1 billion-plus users.

Facebook requires that 30 per cent of its users participate for a vote to count. It has held two earlier elections and neither met that threshold.

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The company said it would adopt the changes despite the opposition. Among the changes is taking away Facebook users' rights to vote on future changes.

Facebook said it plans to give users other ways to weigh in on policy changes, such as an ''Ask the Chief Privacy Officer'' question-and-answer forum on its website.

The company also plans to ease restrictions on who can message you on Facebook and it aims to share information with its affiliates, including the popular photo-sharing service Instagram.

In comments on Facebook, some users protested. ''Wow, just wow. Don't ask people to vote, then completely ignore their voices,'' Daniel Horton wrote.

Cindy Storm complained that the polls ''were hard to locate and rarely worked''.

But Elliot Schrage, the vice-president of communications, public policy and marketing, said in a blog post Facebook made ''substantial efforts to inform our users and encourage them to vote, both through emails and their News Feeds''.